y ordered done; but
at five o'clock, about two miles south of the park, the truck went
through a bridge culvert and rolled all the way to the bottom of a
ravine. The driver escaped with his life but the production of _Lucia_
was smashed to splinters.

Mary chanced upon this piece of information and brought it straight to
Paula. "Tell them to go ahead with _Pagliacci_, then," Paula said. "I'll
sing 'Nedda' myself. Get LaChaise on the phone and let me talk to him."

She did sing it without any rehearsal at all. And she gave a performance
which for most of the persons who saw it, made her the, and the only,
"Nedda"; though--or perhaps, because--she didn't give the part quite its
traditional characterization; adapted it with the unscrupulousness of the
artist to her own purpose.

Paula's "Nedda" was a sulky slattern, indifferent, lazy, smoldering with
passion,--dangerous. The sensuous quality of her beauty had never been
more apparent than it was in the soiled cheap mountebank fineries which
she had worn for so many performances of the part in Europe. And this
beauty, of course, did a lot of the work for her. Explained the tragedy
all by itself. And, indeed, tragedy hung visibly over her from the moment
of her first entrance upon the stage in the donkey cart. She was the sort
of woman men kill and are killed for.

She played the part with an extreme economy of movement, with a kind of
feline stillness which made her occasional explosions into action, as
when she attacked Tonio with the whip, literally terrifying. She sang it
carelessly and therefore in a manner absolutely gorgeous. She swept them
all, critics as well as the immense audience, clean off their feet.

Also, by way of a foot-note, the managerial announcement that Madame
Carresford had volunteered for the part at six o'clock, to rescue them
from the necessity of closing the park and was to sing it absolutely
without rehearsal, exploded for all time the notion that there was
anything of the amateur about her.

"You can do anything," LaChaise told her as she came out into the wings.
And he kissed her on both cheeks rather solemnly, in the manner of one
conferring a decoration. In full measure pressed down and running over,
that was how Paula's success came to her.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WAYFARER

By the time Paula had got back to her dressing-room after the long series
of tumultuous curtain calls was over, the rush of her friends to express
their con